Emphasis on small units sparks program to improve team performance.(Technology)

* The revamped strategy for fighting in Afghanistan revolves around the success of small ground units that will disperse throughout the country. To raise the bar on the performance of those troops, the Defense Department is establishing a program that will focus its efforts on improving team collaboration.

The National Program for Small Unit Excellence will strive to collect information from existing and ongoing scientific studies and fund additional research that will enhance the performance of squads, platoons and other smallsized groups in the Defense Department's traditional forces, says Army Maj. Gen. Jason Kamiya, commander of the joint warfighting center at U.S. Joint Forces Command. He is spearheading the initiative, which acknowledges that there is a disparity in the way small conventional units perform when compared to special operations forces. Its intent is to help bridge that gap.

"The program's goal isn't to make conventional forces equal to Special Forces," he says. "No amount of resources would allow for that."

Instead, the program will facilitate a discussion between experts in academia, government and industry on issues pertaining to small units to identify where expertise is deficient.

"I see the program incentivizing and providing the resources for some pocket of subject matter expertise to conduct that research, or that body of work, on behalf of the community," adds Kamiya.

His staff has identified four focus areas that require immediate attention. One of them is in collaborative tools and knowledge management systems that will enable small unit leaders to blog or interact with experts in behavioral and other sciences. "This is so essential that we all believe it must be delivered within the first year," Kamiya says. U.S. Special Operations Command employs one such tool called "Starfish." Kamiya says he will investigate that system as a possible solution.

The team also will focus on how to assess and measure the effectiveness of training technologies. Across the industry, experts concur that there is a deficit of scientific studies to address the issue. "Absent an assessment and measurement capability, we risk replicating every single rock on the streets of Baghdad," Kamiya says, referring to the gaming and training community's penchant for investing millions of dollars to represent real-world environmental details in the virtual world. Without a tool that can objectively measure the value that such training technology has on the cognitive, physiological and psychological stresses of the individual immersed in the training environment, "we're just grabbing straws," he says.

The program also intends to address what some experts acknowledge is a deficit of studies on small group behavior. A vast body of work has been conducted on individual human behavior, but similar documentation of how humans interact within small units is lagging. Kamiya says that the program intends to identify areas where more research is needed and fund those studies:

Work will progress in collaboration with the Department of Homeland Security because first responders also work in small teams.

"We're very, very hopeful that this partnership with the Department of Homeland Security will result in benefits to the military and to the first responder community," says Kamiya.

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